Success Quote by Gerard Arpey

The line reads like corporate boilerplate until you notice its quiet refusal to romanticize business. Arpey doesn’t dress customer service up as altruism; he pins it to the only metric that keeps the lights on. “Excellent care” is deliberately warm, almost moral language. “At a profit” snaps it back to the ledger. The intent is managerial clarity: service isn’t a vibe, it’s a discipline, and it has to survive contact with costs, competition, and shareholders.

The subtext is a rebuke to two common fantasies. One is the growth-at-any-price playbook, where companies buy loyalty with discounts, perks, and free shipping until the unit economics collapse. The other is the hard-nosed, margin-first approach that treats customers as captive revenue streams. Arpey’s formulation is a narrow bridge between them: if customers aren’t genuinely taken care of, profit becomes temporary; if profit isn’t real, care becomes performative.

Context matters. As a longtime airline executive (and former American Airlines CEO), Arpey operated in an industry where “customer experience” is constrained by physics, regulation, labor contracts, and fuel prices. Airlines can’t simply charm their way out of weather delays or thin margins. In that world, promising “excellent care” without mentioning profit would be naive; insisting on profit without care invites reputational freefall and, eventually, empty seats.

Rhetorically, it works because it pairs an aspiration with a boundary. It’s less a mission statement than a managerial test: any initiative that doesn’t improve the customer’s reality and the company’s economics is just expensive storytelling.